Obituary: Sandy Wilson, composer

Sandy Wilson: Composer whose sole hit The Boy Friend in 1953 made him immensely wealthy. Picture: AP

In 1953 Sandy Wilson was commissioned to write a musical for a £25 advance and the same amount after a projected short run at The Player’s Theatre near Charing Cross station in London. He sketched out The Boy Friend in a few days and delivered the complete show a fortnight later. It ran in the London’s West End for five years and provided immense pleasure to many theatre-goers. The music was fun, the insouciant plot undemanding and the young cast totally charming. It may well have been “frothy”, as many critics labelled it, but it made Wilson very wealthy.

The Boy Friend reflected the carefree days of the Roaring Twenties and Bright Young Things with perfect Oxford accents who played tennis and broke into the Charleston whenever possible. It was a flappers’ paradise. The highly memorable tunes – including It’s Never Too Late To Fall In Love, Won’t You Charleston With Me? and I Could Be Happy With You – were wildly sentimental and a delight.

After its brief run at the Player’s Theatre, the show transferred to the West End and its international popularity was enhanced when it opened on Broadway and made a star of the young Julie Andrews. In 1971 Ken Russell made a movie that starred Twiggy and Christopher Gable which did not gain Wilson’s approval.

The show has remained hugely popular with amateur groups and many revivals have been seen in Scotland of late – notably at Kelso High School in 2005 and Stirling and Bridge of Allan Operatic Society in 2009. As if to underline the attraction of the music – and its longevity – the Naxos label reissued Peter Maxwell Davies’s dance band arrangement of the show’s music year.

Alexander Galbraith Wilson was born in the Manchester suburb of Sale. He was the youngest of four and the only son. His parents had met and married in India, where his father worked for a Scottish shipping company, although he lost his job in the Depression and brought his family back to live in north London. Wilson’s father brought him up with strong Presbyterian principles (neither the theatre nor the cinema were permitted) while his mother was, he said, “imaginative and wilful”.

The family had close connections with the weaving firm Wilson’s of Bannockburn, which had been manufacturing tartan for more than 100 years, although by the 1920s it had switched to weaving carpets.

Sandy Wilson was the last male descendant of the founder, and was sent to be educated at Harrow, where he acted in school productions. After war service in the Ordnance Corps, he read English Literature at Oxford – again, devoting much of his time to the university’s dramatic society.

After university, Wilson spent a year at the Old Vic Theatre School and wrote occasional sketches for after-dinner revues which were then immensely popular. But his life changed dramatically when he was asked to write a play for the Player’s Theatre. The Boy Friend was an instant hit and it earned him so much money that his accountant told him he need never work again.

He fell out with the Broadway producers and Ken Russell over the film version of the play. Both the impresario Cameron Mackintosh and the then National Theatre’s boss Trevor Nunn wanted to mount revivals in the 1970s but Wilson would not countenance any of their proposed changes.

He did compose other musicals but none came close to matching The Boy Friend. My Royal Past was abandoned in the mid-1950s and, most wounding of all, Valmouth (1958) received damning reviews despite having stars such as Cleo Laine and Fenella Fielding (it was revived at Chichester in 1982 with limited success). Divorce Me, Darling, his 1964 follow-up to The Boy Friend, was savaged by the critics – Bernard Levin called it “relentlessly incomprehensible”.

Wilson was a prolific writer and critic and contributed serious appraisals of both Noël Coward and Ivor Novello which did much to reestablish their rather tarnished reputations after the arrival of kitchen-sink drama. His autobiography, I Could be Happy, was published in 1975.

He contributed songs to television shows such as TW3 but, although never bitter, he hankered after another hit musical. He was uncomfortable with rock music and preferred the style, wit and elegance of shows with tunes, happy-go-lucky characters and a jolly ending.

By the 1960s pop music and musical theatre had changed radically and Wilson’s style was of a bygone era.

Wilson was a talented and enthusiastic cook and listed “reminiscing” as a hobby. For many years he lived with his partner, Chak Yui (who survives him) in his South Kensington flat and his house in Somerset. Both homes were full of scores, records, books, photographs, theatrical memorabilia – and, of course, a grand piano.